DOHA: US chief negotiator for climate change Jonathan Pershing rubbished the principle of sharing the atmospheric space with other countries in a closed-door meeting, whose clandestine recording has been accessed by TOI.

The principle is India's fundamental demand since New Delhi requires the carbon space in the atmosphere to power its economic growth. Currently, the developed world occupies around 70% of the atmospheric space and unless big economies like the US vacate it partially by reducing their emissions, their poorer counterparts would not be able to raise their growth levels without tipping the climate change into an irreversible and extreme level.

Pershing was speaking off the record to a group of international NGOs, when he ripped into the principle of equity that underlies the sharing of atmospheric space. His reason: the world needs to strike a compromise since he wouldn't be able to sell the idea to his domestic audience.

Pershing said, "It's a vision you can say that the atmosphere can take an X quantity of coal emissions and therefore what you do is you divide that number into percentages. The obligation it states is that you (the US) would have to reduce its emissions down to negative 37% (below 1990 levels). And the obligation of China will be a tiny bit, but India can still grow quite a lot. The politics of that quite frankly really don't work. I can't really sell that to the US Congress."

Suggesting that the US preferred to take the domestic constituency into confidence while making the commitment and not go by scientific requirements, he reasoned, "One way to think about it is what you could deliver. You say what you are going to do and you will be held to that. So how do you marry the reality of what you are doing with the reality of what is needed. To me, it's going to be a hybrid. It's going to be something between those two."

Unlike the Kyoto Protocol approach where the UN convention first decides how much reduction is required and then apportions the burden, Pershing suggested — in what's dubbed not a new US position — that each country decides independently what it wants to do and put it on the global table.

Reiterating that US domestic political compulsions were paramount, he added, "Because if we can't take it home and sell it at home, in whatever political economy we are living in, we won't do it."